Rainbow rice cake

Mujigae-tteok 무지개떡

I’m going to introduce a beautiful Korean rice cake today. It’s called mujigae-tteok (무지개떡). Mujigae means rainbow, so my ancestors must have got the idea for the name from a rainbow! I love it! This is an example of how they incorporated natural beauty into their everyday life. Even though the name of the rice cake is “rainbow rice cake,” it is usually made with only 3-5 different colored layers. That’s why this rice cake is sometimes called “colorful rice cake” (색떡, saektteok).

In this recipe, I am using 5 different colors from bottom to top: brown, green, yellow, pink, and white.

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This rice cake is made on special occasions like a baby’s 1 year old birthday, or a wedding. As you see in this video, making this rice cake takes a lot of effort and time, even though the ingredients are comparatively simple. However, if you make this rice cake for someone very special in your life, you wouldn’t care much about time and effort. : ) You may wish this while you’re rubbing the rice flour with your palms:

A note about short grain rice flour: the flour you buy at your local store or the flour you make may have more or less moisture in it than the rice flour I use in this recipe. This is because of many different things like how long it’s been in the freezer in the store, or the atmospheric conditions where you live. You may need to steam more or less, depending on how dry or wet your short grain rice flour is.

I went to a Korean grocery today. They have two kinds of frozen rice – regular rice and sweet rice. I bought the sweet rice. Should I have bought the regular frozen rice? I want to make the steamed rice cake but I’ve noticed the recipe does not specify if it’s using the rice flour made from regular or sweet rice. Thanks.

The recipe calls for frozen short grain rice flour, not sweet rice flour. Any time you are not sure what to get, click the link of the ingredient in one of my recipes and you’ll get all the details of exactly what you need. https://www.maangchi.com/ingredient/frozen-rice-flour

So I made this today. It did not turn out the way I expected. I already used 1/2 the sugar called for in the recipe because I was using sweet rice and it was still far too sweet. The consistency was very sticky as well, not at all like the rice cake I had bought in store. Even though I had steamed it for 3 minutes it had an odd uncooked consistency to it. Not sure how to explain it any better. I made it 3 layers – matcha green tea, plain white, and a brown layer using Japanese black sugar. The flavors were good, albeit toooooo sweet. Live and learn.

Now that I have approximately 1.75kg of the sweet rice flour sitting in my freezer, what else can I make with it?

Hi Maangchi,
I want to make a rice cake for my Korean daughter in law’s birthday. She loves coconut so I would like to make it coconut flavoured. Can I add shredded coconut to the rice mix? If so how much?
Thank you
Cheriee

I did a small test and it worked. I followed your directions for the white layer and added 1/4 cup shredded dried coconut to 1 cup of rice flour. I couldn’t sift it though because of the coconut. When I make the full cake on Saturday I will sift it into a bowl and then add the coconut and put it in the pan. The coconut flavour was delicious! Thank you so much for your inspiration Maangchi!